Demo impressions: Fuzion Frenzy 2

It takes some skill to put together a compelling demo, and Fuzion Frenzy 2 …

I like playing demos. Downloadable demos may be my favorite part of this generation of consoles, but the more of them I try, the more I realize there is something of an art involved in releasing a good demo. For instance, take today's release of the Fuzion Frenzy 2 demo. I enjoyed the first Fuzion Frenzy when it was released on the original Xbox. It was a fun little party game that made me buy three more controllers for my new system. This was a long time before Xbox Live, so I was dependent on my friends to play it with me, and for some reason they didn't enjoy it as much as I did. In other words, Fuzion Frenzy was a bad buy for me; it sat on the shelf way too often. I thought an online version of the game would be a huge hit though: once Xbox Live was a part of my life I waited for a sequel that never came. Now that the 360 is here, we get a sequel that features online play. Great! I finally get to have some good party games whenever I want to play, even if my friends were as lukewarm about the sequel as they were the original. I downloaded the demo expecting great things and got...well, it didn't sell me very well.

The demo doesn't support online play, and that was a disappointment. I really wanted to play this game online; that's the feature that got me interested in Fuzion Frenzy 2 to begin with. You can play four players at once, but this afternoon no one was around to play, so I was stuck playing against the computer. Party games against CPU opponents are good for nothing except practice, and these games aren't very hard to learn.

It doesn't help that the demo only has three games: Sumo Paint, Ice Treasure Hunt, and Conveyor Belt Chaos. This is three out of 43 games that will be available in the $50 retail version, and the games haven't been picked very well. At least, I hope they're not representative of the finished product. Sumo Paint is a fun game: you're in one of those American Gladiator hamster-balls and have to roll over the field to "paint" the blocks your color while avoiding being knocked off. Solid stuff. Ice Treasure Hunt has your character using a flame thrower to melt ice blocks to unlock coins, and it's just as boring as it sounds. Conveyor Belt Chaos is everything one of these games shouldn't be: slow and dull.

The graphics are simple but look attractive in high-definition, and while the character designs and butt-rock soundtrack have a certain mid-80s charm, the demo just didn't sell me on the game. And I wanted to like it! The thing is, I'm still interested in the retail game. I think with the full run of games and online play it could be a lot of fun. The issue is that without online play and with bad choices for the demo levels, the experience just didn't do a good job of convincing me to take another look at the full version.